Sarah had taken to house cleaning with the energy and focus of someone with some sort of disorder. She cleaned the bathrooms and the kitchen and disinfected the toilets again. She vacuumed and wiped skirting boards and scrubbed surfaces. But it was the windows that took much of her attention.
Damien had left chocolate handprints along the large front windows the day after Sarah had cleaned them, so after she delivered the kids to school and kindy she got out her rags and cleaning fluids, went outside and started all over again. She rubbed furiously at the glass, hoping the activity would stop her thinking. But somehow it promoted thinking about Ian and how he was so perfectly friendly and polite, always told her what he was up to and apologised if he was late for a meal. He helped out around the house and jumped to any favour she asked of him. If she didn’t invite him to her bed soon, then chances were they would never share a bed again. The problem was she wasn’t sure if she really cared. Despite the chill, Sarah was beginning to sweat from her vigorous wiping. When Ian had cheated on her, she could deal with the rage and the pain because she cared, but this new sense that it didn’t matter made her feel desolate. It was a growing truth that sat in her chest like a sulky child and didn’t listen to her suggestions that ‘It’ll return’ and ‘He’ll come back’ and ‘Couples work through these things’. She couldn’t help herself yearning for the naiveté of a year ago, of two years ago, of ten years ago. The times she’d spent with Angela solving family problems, both of them secretly impressed by their children and the good fortune of their lives. She should talk to Angela more, and Nikki, but somehow she couldn’t quite find her way back to them and the way things had been. Perhaps she was afraid of their pity.
It was most likely that Ian didn’t really care about sleeping with her again either. He probably felt he could get away with anything and still have family and home. It wasn’t healthy for a man to have that sort of privilege. He was making Joel look good.
She went inside to see what marks she had missed on the outside and knew she would keep doing this: checking inside and then checking outside until she was seeing blemishes that weren’t there. With a clean cloth she started again.
Over the weeks after she returned, Sarah had slowly realised that what she had taken for affection from Ian was really dependence. He needed her to raise their children, to look after the house, to make him meals so that he could live life the way he wanted. But he wanted these things badly enough to make her feel like she was loved. Wasn’t that enough? How much did anyone expect from a long-term relationship? But still a draught whistled through her house with the sound of the awful truth that love was gone and could not be brought back.
She hadn’t spoken to Brock since he left, since he turned up at her house the day before the meeting to tell her he was leaving and why. He told her about the sexual assault threat as they sat in Sarah’s bright kitchen trying to drink teabag tea.
‘She says this all happened on the night of the fire?’
‘That’s why she didn’t report it. It was all too much for her.’
It was either true or fiendishly clever or both. You had to give her that. If asked, by someone smart, like an expensive barrister, say, Sarah would agree she’d seen something about Jennifer and Brock that night. And had that same clever person put it to her, a few weeks ago, that what she had witnessed on that night was not sex but violence she might have doubted herself and believed it to be true. Was that what Jennifer had planned? Had Jennifer counted on Sarah’s intuition and that that intuition could be swayed or transformed to support her? Luckily now she was a person who wasn’t swayed by such suggestions, who believed in her own instincts. Wasn’t she? As she sat thinking about it and appraising a downcast Brock, she simply couldn’t stop the emergence of doubt; a shameful fear that if she was wrong about Brock she would be supporting someone who was violent and brutal. All the evidence that she trusted, her eyes, her heart, her skin, her sense, said Brock was innocent and still she couldn’t make the leap to certainty. The stakes were so high. She took another good look at Brock and felt just a little bit reassured.
‘Does she know that I know about you two?’
‘Yes.’
‘Did she start the fire?’
‘Maybe.’
‘Maybe?’
‘She had a cigarette after we … after we, you know. That’s the only cigarette I know of.’
This was scheming to a new level. ‘You didn’t coerce her?’ There wasn’t any heat in the question. It was more of an offhand query but she had to ask it. At the back of her brain she held the thought that if she asked the question as if she really didn’t care then he might be more likely to share even the smallest confession. And screaming at the edges of incredulity was that fact that Sarah was experienced at asking this question. What a life.
He shook his head sadly.
‘The detective knows something’s up,’ she said.
‘It doesn’t matter,’ Brock said. ‘It doesn’t change anything really.’
‘There’s a lot of support for you out there, Brock, but when it comes to your word against Jennifer’s …’ She let it trail off. The sound of her resolve failing was painful enough inside her head without broadcasting it. Anyway, there was no need for her to say such obvious things. Brock had already made his decision.
She had really wanted him to stay. She had wanted him to be Damien and Julia’s teacher. But she hadn’t anticipated the corrosive power of the idea of sexual assault and hadn’t guessed that Jennifer would be prepared to lay waste to everything. This sort of fight could destroy the school and the community.
But she proceeded with her strategy. ‘Instead of leaving cold, I wonder if you shouldn’t consider taking some sick leave. Maybe stress leave because of the fire?’
‘Sounds a bit devious, Sarah. I’m not stressed. Not by the fire anyway.’
‘If you step aside, there has to be a new selection process and you know how that goes.’
‘I could reapply?’
She nodded. ‘You take stress leave, then you wait for the job to be advertised, then you put your hand up.’
‘What about the sexual assault stuff? Won’t she just bring it up again?’
‘Maybe. But by then things might have calmed down. She might be over you.’
‘What if I’m not over her?’
She hadn’t considered that. She’d only thought of Brock as the person being used. If he was in love with Jennifer it probably wasn’t a good idea for him to return to the school. Now she stood back, examining the windows, and wondered if Brock would ever return. She had thought then that he liked the idea of coming back. Sometimes, though, when you got away from a bubble like Stony Creek you looked back and realised you never wanted re-enter it.
Perhaps that’s what the kiss really meant. You could never forget Jennifer’s face afterwards. It was shocked and embarrassed, and yet glowing. Everyone had their own explanation. It had certainly stirred up the talk. Brock had outdone himself with that one.
In the school car park, after the meeting, after Jennifer had gone, Betty Thomson, with help from a bottle of wine retrieved from Pam’s car, loudly claimed the kiss was too hot to be innocent. There had to be something in it. A scandal if ever there was one. Susie Green pointed out one kiss was just one kiss, that was all, and wasn’t it really some sort of harassment? Jennifer could have him fired if he hadn’t been given the push already. Pam, who claimed to know about kisses, said there was nothing in it. It was no more than a mother to a son. ‘The son being Oedipus then,’ Angela said at the top of her voice, as she clapped Sarah on the shoulder and laughed like she’d been on the wine all day. Sarah couldn’t believe she hadn’t told anyone about their phone call early on. Someone else called it a Judas kiss. Betty nearly rolled her ankle jumping around while trying to get her point across, and others hurried to the safety of their cars, feeling another scandal was about to break its banks.
But Sarah knew what it was and couldn’t stop knowing.
She had seen Jennifer’s face after Brock’s kiss and was immediately back in the meeting six months ago. This was not assault. This was attraction. She saw herself leaving that last meeting, head down, pretending to be sick and looking into Jennifer’s handbag and seeing … a pack of cigarettes. It was the final image that made her feel safe. No one stopped for a smoke after a violent assault.
Sarah put down the cleaning products and slumped into the agapanthus, feeling exhausted by how complex everything had become. It was cold, damp and uncomfortable on her back and backside and maybe she deserved it.
She and Jennifer had been voted onto the selection panel with Alice, the cluster director. It meant spending some time alongside Jennifer. Not much, because no one had applied, and even then they had hardly talked. They couldn’t talk about their husbands or children and weren’t going to ask how the other was feeling. And the way Jennifer had dealt with Brock was so ruthless and unfair that Sarah wanted to say: ‘You slept with him, you blackmailed him and you probably burned down the school.’ But she didn’t.
Now Gwen was doing her best to run the school despite her limited grasp of computers and recent teaching trends. Damien was enjoying it because Gwen was heavily reliant on colouring in, cutting and pasting, and singing.
The department would soon be making noises about appointing someone and they would be quick to ask if students would consider going to Fresh Well if no one came forward.
A chill breeze began cutting its way through the green aggies fronds and Sarah stood, aware of her tummy and thick thighs, and thought how envious she had been of Jennifer over the years: her figure, her certainty, her ability to keep everything under control. At least she still had her figure. The certainty was withered and the control probably only extended to her garden: Madison certainly wasn’t under control and she couldn’t imagine Andy was in any mood to be controlled. What had he made of the kiss? As the weeks went on, Jennifer seemed to strengthen, but it wasn’t the same as before. And who could blame her? Something unmanageable had rent her world.
Sarah’s windows were finally clean, but it was a desperate situation. Where was Brock?
IAN
He hadn’t managed to organise another rendezvous with Madison and now the principal, half of his excuse for communicating with her, had left town. It wasn’t going as well as he’d expected. Madison rejected his account of seeing Jennifer and Brock in the car, saying he was seeing things. She replied to his other messages, but he had the feeling that he was going backwards rather than forwards. Patience, he kept telling himself. There was all the time in the world and no doubt Madison was busy with her study. He just had to bide his time.
He’d given up hoping for a return of marital relations with Sarah, in the short term anyway. She wasn’t interested. He could hardly blame her, but he had been holding onto a weak notion that since she had moved back in she might want him again. What was the point of returning if you were going to live like a single mother? But she had shown no signs of weakening.
Push-ups had become an important part of his life. He did them every night to keep himself in shape and take his mind off women and their parts. He increased the number every few nights, and every few nights he felt like he needed more to take his mind off things.
As he did them, mantras rolled through his mind: He was a clever operator. He had done everything right. His messages were cool and witty. He was a handsome man. Surely there must be a breakthrough soon.
JENNIFER
She had won the day and she had lost the day. She hadn’t had to wield the sexual assault weapon and Brock had moved on without a fight. Stress leave? She was the one who deserved it.
She had ads in the paper and the newsletter shortly after the meeting. There were still no responses. Andy was being remarkably even-handed about the whole thing: not making snide comments about Brock, not watching her like a hawk, and saying nothing about the kiss.
That bloody kiss. The damn blindside. By the time she got control of herself she knew her face must be telling the world: ‘Yep. I’m mad for him.’
It was terrifying to say it, but impossible to avoid the idea that she might be in love with him. Well, infatuated—something. Somewhere in between the mad chukkas of sexual activity, love, or a cousin of it, had popped up its unwanted, unmentionable head.
In the meeting, when she was vaguely aware of him leaning down, followed by the slow physical realisation that he was making contact with her skin, it hit her—body slammed her—that she did indeed love him. For the smallest fraction of time, she would have jumped up and hugged him without the slightest care for what anyone thought. Thankfully the impulse was past before it really took hold, and she was back rearranging her face into something the meeting could understand.
But it didn’t stop how she felt about him.
She took up mowing the lawns twice as often as she used to, and she had always been an impeccable lawn manager. The struggle to find another principal was going to be a titanic one. She knew that. It was hard enough to find a live one at the best of times, let alone after the most recent one had left after six months, on stress leave. There’s a job recommendation for you. And old Gwen Clift, while she was very good at rhyming rote learning of times tables, was lucky if she could find the door to the classroom never mind negotiate her way around a bank of computers and a smart board. It would probably be the finish of the school, and all her work would be for nothing.
As well as mowing, she had taken to weeping, silently and sometimes not-so-silently to herself, when no one was around. It was weak and pathetic but it made her feel the smallest bit better.
She made sure she put on her best face for Andy: she was busy, happy and always doing small things for him. Of course, there was the sex that had to be endured. He’d come up with the notion that she was now a highly sexual being and intended to capitalise on it. It had been okay for a while, simply as a diversion of her desires, but it became gradually more difficult until she was pretending he was Brock and then feeling nothing, dreading his hand on her neck or shoulder.
Inevitably, as she was whipper-snipping the already-trimmed edges of the garden beds, the notion that she had made the wrong choice stole its way into her ruminations. Was she doing everything, sacrificing her feelings, her desire, him, maybe even the last of her youth for these garden beds? For a life with a husband she no longer had powerful feelings for? No. She was doing it for Madison, for reputation and respectability, and because she loved her life: the people, the place and, sure, the things.
That decision had sparked a sarcastic devil’s advocate in her head, never missing an opportunity to question her life choices: ‘Oh yes. One should always sacrifice love in order to have floors to mop and underpants to wash. Another good decision, Jennifer. If you were having wild passionate sex with Brock right now I’m sure you would be thinking: I wish I was at home cleaning those toilet bowls. And so on.
But in the end it was still just a notion. A sensible, mature woman did not throw everything in for something that life experience told her was fleeting.
Twenty years and a husband and a child were things that held her together. Without them she was sure she would simply collapse. This would pass, that was something she was certain of. She just had to hang on long enough for it to happen.
BROCK
Brock went and stayed with his brother Carl, the plumber, in the city, who was glad to see him (for a while) and impressed with his car and the fact that he wasn’t borrowing money. Carl occupied a rambling suburban house with his pretty, messy wife, Linda (who Brock had always got on well with), surrounded by a garden, a street and a backyard full of boats, jet skis, fishing rods and other adornments of leisure. It was a good, comfortable place to stay on stress leave, despite a strange sensation that everything seemed so confined. Not just in Carl’s garden, but in the street, in shops, in buildings. You couldn’t move without being in touch with another human being or their property. He realised he was still in the habit of sa
ying hello to everyone in the street and the supermarket, even when he didn’t know them. He knew the habit wouldn’t last. It was like a temporary accent or the knowledge that your life was indulgent after you’d spent time around real poverty.
The stress leave was a great lark, but he really couldn’t see himself returning to Stony Creek, facing up to Jennifer and her family and asking the community for support. When he looked at it from a distance he saw that the door was closed. Jennifer had slammed it loudly shut behind him. His next job would be here in the city somewhere. His old school was now Emily-free, so he reckoned he could talk his way back in there, even if it was only as a casual at the start.
Over beers on the verandah, looking at the kikuyu growing up through the spare boat trailer, Linda asked: ‘Why’d you leave? You never told us. Did you sleep with an important cockie’s wife or something?’ Carl and Linda sniggered and dug each other in the ribs.
Brock looked blankly off into the neighbour’s Italian garden. It was teeming with vegetable matter.
‘You didn’t?’ Carl said. ‘Bullshit!’ They laughed even harder. ‘They must be desperate out there in the bush.’
‘Oh, Carl. That’s not true,’ Linda said. ‘That pain-in-the-arse Emily never seemed to mind.’
He smiled a little, too. It was pretty funny from here. He thought how lucky Carl was to have Linda and wished he could meet someone like her. He’d managed to hook up with a particular type of woman, twice in a row. How was that?
They stopped laughing and peered at him.
‘Jesus, mate, by the look on your face, whatever it was back there, the woman or the school, you need to get back to it.’
The Good Teacher Page 16
